Ah, Saturday morning. Sure, there aren't any cartoons on, but I'm here with a bowl of cereal, a cup of coffee, and a few hours while Kel's at work and the kids are asleep, so let's chat a bit about San Francisco, shall we?
I first saw SF in the summer of 2004, when I was in L.A. for the BookExpo America and was offered a ride up to the Bay Area for a party being thrown by one of my Readerville buddies for a bunch of my other Readerville buddies. While I was there, I stayed with Ken, my friend since junior high, as well as visiting with his sister Nan and her family, but I only got into the city for one day, hopping a Cali train from Palo Alto to the stop near Balco Park (or whatever it's called this week). From there, I walked up Third Street, passing the Moscone Center and SFMOMA, crossed Market into Chinatown, had a good cheap Vietnamese lunch, strolled down Columbus toward the TransAmerica Pyramid and was immediately sucked into City Lights Bookstore (which didn't carry
The Verb 'To Bird', dammitall.) Then I walked back down the hill to the train station and headed back down the peninsula for dinner with Ken.
All told, I couldn't have been in the city for more than five hours, but one thing became apparent immediately: that Kelly would love this place. She's energized by cities in a way that I'm not, finding the press and variety of humanity deeply appealing. She also dearly loves the opportunities for examining the works of humanity, whether in museums, theaters, or shop windows. SF was full of all these things, but there is also a palpable sense of civic pride; you get the feeling everyone there knows they could be somewhere else less interesting, and they do their best to provide the small touches that make the city attractive, whether it's commissioning a mural, tending a flowering plant, or setting a water dish out on the sidewalks for the dogs of passersby. You get the feeling that people there enjoy the presence of other people, which is not a sensation you always get in New York or D.C.
Of course, I liked it too, which made me think this would be an ideal spot for a vacation with the family, so I immediately started making vague plans for our trip there--plans which kept running into conflicts with scheduling and/or funding. Once it became obvious that we wouldn't make it out to Cali in 2006, I sat down with Kelly and planned out a savings strategy and blocked out some time during which we WOULD be going to SF. To my surprise, we saved enough money AND found a free week, which is how we ended up heading to Oakland Airport on JetBlue two weeks ago today.
We spent most of Saturday getting settled into our lodgings at the aforementioned
Marina Motel, which were wonderful. We had a two-room suite: a bedroom with a king and two windows (allowing for a wonderful cross-breeze at night) and a kitchenette/living room with a sofa bed where the boys set up shop. We also had a beautifully tiled bathroom whose shower stall had a window looking into the back garden; it was frosted for the sake of delicacy, but you could open the window during a hot shower and feel a cool breeze on your skin.
The kitchenette, equipped with fridge, gas stove, sink, microwave, and coffeemaker, allowed us the luxury of eating a few cheap meals, which was a financial help. The room rates (we paid $155 per night for Saturday & Sunday nights, $135 per night for the next three nights) were also a big help in that regard. The living room's front windows, which looked down into the Marina's cobbled courtyard, were almost but not completely covered by the brilliant blooms of what must have been the world's largest bougainville, and if the wind was up and we opened the windows, petals actually blew into the room. All in all, we were pretty comfy.
I'll tell you about Sunday's trip to Point Reyes (and a few other odd bits of birding) in another post, except to say that the first time I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge it was too fogbound to be seen. In fact, the fog was a fairly consistent part of the Golden Gate experience; we didn't see either of the bridge's towers until Wednesday, despite the fact that the Marina is located only about five blocks from the Palace of Fine Arts and easily within sight of the bridge. The rest of the sky was sunny and clear, but that around the Golden Gate remained hidden in an intriguing variety of mists, fogs, and clouds.
Even when we sailed out to Alcatraz on Monday evening, bundled and layered in every article we had, we couldn't see through the gray to spot the bridge. We could see that the sun was setting in that general direction, yes, but somehow the biting wind that roiled out of the west was doing absolutely nothing to clear away the mists. The island itself is fascinating--a wonderful mixture of scenic grandeur (you can see the WHOLE FREAKIN' BAY from out there, after all), natural variety (there are thousands of seabirds roosting there every evening--mostly Western Gulls and cormorants), historical depth (from the Spanish explorers to the Civil War soldiers to the American Indian occupiers), and of course the sheer mesmerism of blood and death. It's basically America's version of the Tower of London.
The audio tour is great, giving you tales of the prison from the people who were there in their own voices: guards and prisoners both tell you about life on the Rock, about the day-to-day routine and the intermittent variations from it--the bloody "Battle of Alcatraz" and the assorted escape attempts. Admittedly, I turned off my headphones and sneaked out into the open air a few times to do a little birding and hope for the wind to clear away the fog around the bridge, but though I spotted a Brandt's Cormorant or two among the many Double-Cresteds, I still couldn't spot a single cable on the bridge. Even after night fell, and we were treated to a beautiful crescent moon approaching Venus in the west, clouds remained clinging to the bridge like wool around a barbed-wire fence.
Tuesday we hit SFMOMA, which was the one thing Kelly had Insisted On Very Pointedly when we were planning the trip. Personally, I like art museums, and I often particularly enjoy modern art because I feel more capable of evaluating it. With, say, Renaissance art, there's a whole vocabulary of which I'm ignorant, not only in terms of the techniques, but of the culture; I don't always recognize the narratives being referenced, or the symbols being applied. (Did you know that the bagpipes in Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights triptych symbolized Bosch's homosexuality? I sure wouldn't have known it just from looking at the painting in the Prado.) With modern art, however, I don't have these "translation" problems, and I can usually feel a connection with the artist--or if I don't, I feel comfortable blaming the artist, rather than my own ignorance, which is what
really matters to any critic.
The main exhibit was on Matisse, primarily his sculpture; it featured his pieces, as well as his preliminary sketches and models, as well as sculptures and paintings by the artists who influenced him and those whom he influenced in turn. After a long while examining the show, I decided that I was much fonder of the work of Cezanne and Rodin than I was of Matisse's appreciations of them, and the only Matisse pieces I found truly inspiring were his late-career colored-paper collages. Somehow the forms that he rendered in 2-D were more attractive, more intriguing, than those in 3-D.
The best thing in the museum, though, was Felix Schramm's enormous installation entitled "Collider." Stretching through three separate galleries--or perhaps including walls that make it LOOK like it stretches through multiple galleries--it's a gigantic mass of drywall, paint, and wallpaper, arranged in vaguely cubicle-shaped compartments. It looks as though part of a building somehow got blasted or dropped into MOMA. The shattered walls loom out over the viewer, askew, their ragged ends sharply contrasting the regular perpendicular arrangement of the "wreckage," and if you duck under them, you'll see what's painted or pasted to the walls themselves, which may offer surprises. It's a strange and unique combination of the beautiful, the menacing, and the unexpected.
On Wednesday we journeyed by bus to Haight-Ashbury, where we found fascinating murals, a variety of freaky shops, and the most awe-inspiring store I've seen in years: Amoeba Music. Located in a former bowling alley, this CD/DVD store has a selection that outdoes pretty much any other place I've been. New and used discs are available, and titles and artists that simply don't turn up in other stores may turn up in multiple bins at Amoeba. I tried to hit everything on my mental list of hard-to-find artists--Rupert Hine, the Swimming Pool Q's, and Henry Badowski weren't there, alas--and actually came away with a few gems. I located the Leonard Cohen tribute album
I'm Your Fan, which features John Cale's definitive version of "Hallelujah"--the one that appears in
Shrek, but is replaced on the soundtrack album by a Rufus Wainwright version. I snagged a copy of the soundtrack to the early-80s ska celebration film
Dance Craze, which includes not only some dynamite Specials tracks, but live versions of two Bad Manners songs ("Lip Up Fatty" and "Inner London Violence") that I've been jonesing for ever since I played them with Rohrwaggon. And I finally tracked down the Knitters' first album,
Poor Little Critter on the Road, whose title track has been embedded in my brain for two decades. Ian found a copy of Nirvana's Incesticide, Dixon found a Buzzcocks collection, and Kelly picked up Morphine's The Night, and I, uh... well, I found another CD or two... or, well, six, really... but I didn't pay more than ten bucks for any of them, and two were only $1.99 apiece!
I could have dropped a whole paycheck there with ease if only I hadn't been thinking "You have to CARRY these things!" the entire time.
Wednesday, our last full day in SF proper, dawned with our first real rain. It wasn't much more than a drizzle, but my attempt to bird on the nearby grounds of the Presidio was hampered by the weather to some degree. After a while, I decided to go downhill and see if things improved. Crossing under a freeway, I found myself at the edge of a long stretch of water--a tidal pool with a grassy embankment on the far side--that actually bordered the Bay. A sidewalk ran along the pool, so I followed it down (spotting a lifer--Heermann's Gull--on a sandbar) and discovered that I was on the edge of Crissy Field, a former airfield now returned to the wild. Joggers, dog-walkers, and cyclists were the main inhabitants at the moment, but as the rain let up a bit, I also saw a pair of Pied-billed Grebes, a Snowy Egret, and a beautiful Long-billed Curlew (which I thought was a lifer at the time, forgetting that I had seen one many years ago in NC). I also realized that Crissy Field would be the perfect place to see the Golden Gate Bridge if only the fog would lift, and I decided to bring the family down if the afternoon were sunnier.
Sure enough, the fog started to lift around lunchtime, so I hauled Kelly and the boys to the waterside. Once we arrived, Dixon and Kelly decided to put their feet in the Bay, since it was their first trip to the Pacific. It was freezing, and Dixon soaked his shoes, but they had fun. Ian and I chose to sit on the concrete steps running down to the Bay and stay dry--I'd swum in the Pacific before, and he was interested in photographing our surroundings. We caught a glimpse of the nose of a sea lion, but it quickly submerged and swam away. The sun had been shining throughout the walk, but it was only after a patient wait that the Bridge finally revealed itself to us: far, far closer than we'd believed, stabbing high into the misty blue with two enormous blades of orange. There were other moments of greater sheer beauty on this trip, perhaps, and some that offered us more profound views of humanity or nature, but somehow sitting on the concrete steps at Crissy Field, watching with my family as the Golden Gate finally came out of the fog, is the moment I'll think of most fondly: the sublime moment when the natural world and the human-built world were both shown to the four of us in their best possible light.
So--next time I'll tell you about Point Reyes, seeing my old girlfriend again, and visiting Oakland. Oh, and hats. Really, really big hats. Be ready.
3:03 PM
